Loggly Charts & Dashboards

2016-2018 / Next generation charting and dashboard feature for log and data analysis

Details

Company: Loggly

Worked on: User experience, usability research, interaction, visual, & systems design

In the news

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Background: The charts and dashboard project was Loggly’s largest and most complex feature initiative and redesign effort and make up about 60-75% of the Loggly App. This advanced intuitive charting and dashboarding feature transformed the Loggly App from a log management to a log analysis tool.

Challenges: Working with and displaying dynamic big data visualization in near realtime, designing the tool as well as its resulting output to accommodate as many common use cases as possible, enabling users to have greater flexibility, getting clear on what the actual most common use cases and workflows are, and designing for optimal user experience. Come up with logical and simple paradigms for how users would interact with dashboards, charts, series, and data and how those elements interact with each other.

Solutions: Designing for the flexibility of the data itself (e.g. lots of data VS sparse data, the ever changing data sets at any given time, etc), the final design enabled a balance between users being able to customize how data is presented and presets that account for how that dynamic data might be presented depending on the time of day or time specified. Because of the complexity of having many moving parts, the UX solution to making things as user friendly as possible was to be absolutely strict in consistent labeling of UI components and actions, consistent paradigm (e.g. the concept of an edit VS view mode is the same for charts and for dashboards), and consistent behavior (e.g. a chart behaves the same way when edited on a chart page as when edited on the search page). Design decisions erred towards being obvious and explicit (e.g. literal and descriptive labels). These are just a couple of examples of the many solutions that were designed and implemented.